Subj : Re: Pascal Tutor?
To   : Charles Stephenson
From : Dan Cross
Date : Sat May 30 2020 06:52:12

On 28 May 2020 at 08:44p, Charles Stephenson pondered and said...
 
 CS> EXACTLY! :)  I think if I learn Pascal, it'll be a good bridge to
 CS> learning other languages.

I wouldn't bother starting with Pascal.

The critical thing when learning how to program is
really learning how to think algorithmically; to that
end, Pascal is an OK language (and was pretty good
when it was introduced) but it's become dated and
there's enough minutia that one has to keep track of
that, even as simple as it is, it can be difficult
to see the forest for the trees.

I'd strongly recommend looking at a Lisp dialect,
Go, or a functional language when starting out.
Specific recommendations are Racket (a member of
the Lisp family) or Standard ML (a functional
language); Go is an imperative systems language,
but can be a bid fiddly around the edges.

Why these and not others?  Because they really
influence how you think about programming.  Once
you've got those down, you can look at C and an
assembly language of your choice.  But your first
language will really put a strong shadow on how
you think that'll take several years to move out
from under; thus, choose wisely.  A language that
started life on a CDC-6000 series mainframe in
the early 70s just doesn't take advantage of some
of the advances in the field that make learning
easier.

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